Hot

You know it's hot when...

 The thermometer in the glasshouse is almost off the scale...

 The cat is lying in a melted puddle on the mat...

 Plants are wilting before your eyes...

 It's too hot to recline in your favourite lounger...

So you go sit under a tree and it isn't any cooler.

I have to give kudos to the weather gods, because summer's been quite satisfactory so far. Sunshine and good temperatures, with rainy days to balance it out. The garden looks good and I feel good.

Happy new year to you... and I hope life is good to you wherever you are.

How to make LED lights look softer

 I posted earlier about my cold blue LED Christmas lights, and how I'd learned that the trick to warming their light colour is just to apply some nail polish in an orange or yellow colour. Recently I was at the mall and spotted some horrible orange nail polish. After wondering to myself why anyone would paint their nails that colour, I remembered the lights.

When I got home I tried the polish on the garland in my hallway and to my great excitement, it worked.

 Before.

 After. It's subtle, but they are much less garish.

The (slight) downside is that when the lights are off they are orange coloured. But no one really looks at Christmas lights when they aren't on, anyway. I'll be painting my other lights after I take the tree down.

(I'm kind of curious to get other colours of nail polish and try them out... you could have a whole rainbow of lights!)

Christmas decorating

 I didn't restrict myself to just a Christmas tree this year. I've also decorated several spots around the house including this shelf in the kitchen. It's difficult to photograph because this room only gets a little bit of early morning sunshine coming through the back door, or else in the late afternoon it beams right through the windows you can see here. I tried my best with the early morning light...

 The string of beaded lights is battery  powered so it's easy to drape over a shelf. 

I used flower frogs to display some Christmas postcards.

 The tall green tree has a white organza ribbon at the top. It's disappeared into the background here...

 Displaying baubles in a glass is a good way to add a pop of colour.

I'd love a proper Christmas village! For now I'm using my little houses and some bottlebrush trees that I need to glitter or paint or something.

 This is the window overlooking my garden. I painted a branch white and suspended it upside down by a ribbon.

These are some handmade ornaments I received in swaps.

I love my decorated kitchen this year. All the extra Christmas cooking is much more bearable with pretty things to look at! Have your decorated your kitchen?

December flowers

This month I'm making the most of the early summer stunners. The peony that I grew from a tuber dug from Mum's garden has finally flowered! It was in bud forever, at least 2 months I would say. Then suddenly the flowers opened, and in a few short days they were finished. They still did better than my shop-bought tuber, which put out some lovely leaves but no flower buds. 

Some late aquilegia are still blooming. And the miniature gladioli have burst into colour. I like the compact size of these little plants, the colours are so vivid that I wouldn't want them any bigger.

As the weather warms up, every day I go outside and something else is blooming. I love this time of year so much. Summer days forever!

As usual I'm linking up to Garden Blogger's Bloom Day.

Christmas, yay

I have a love/hate relationship with Christmas. Some years I'm into it and can't wait to decorate, and some years I'm a grinch and just want it all to be over. This year it's Christmas, yay. I put my tree up in the last week of November and have been enjoying it ever since. I went with a blue, pink and silver colour scheme, mixing it up with cheap shop-bought balls and my favourite handmade decorations from previous years. 

Last year I bought LED lights thinking they'd last longer than classic fairy lights so it would be a good investment. When I got them home and plugged them in I really wasn't too fond of the cool blue light they gave off. This year, I notice LED lights now come in either cool blue or warm yellow tones, but I'm not going to just buy a new set. Thanks to blogland, I've learned that the trick to warming up your cold LED lights is to simply paint the bulbs with nail polish in an orange or yellow shade. Of course, I found that out a couple of days after I'd set up the tree, so I'll wait till next year to try that one out. At least the blue fits in with the colour scheme!

What's on your Christmas tree this year?

Weird Cat Behaviour #7

WEIRD CAT BEHAVIOUR #7

Killing a bird and eating it under the Christmas tree.

I killed a bird, I liked it!

The taste of that chewy chaffinch.

I killed a bird, just to try it

I hope my stomach don't mind it.

It felt so wrong, it felt so right

I'll throw it back up tonight.

I killed a bird, I liked it!

I liked it!

(Weird human behaviour: writing alternative lyrics to Katy Perry songs. I didn't do it all on my own though... thanks to my mum for being as silly as me!)

Weird Cat Behaviour is an occasional series on my blog. For other weird things my cat has done, click here.